We are so excited about our friend and frequent collaborator Sunja Link's new Main Street shop. If you are in Vancouver be sure to visit her tiny jewel box filled with all natural and organic face and body products, including but not limited to jade face rollers, fragrant powders and elixirs for the bath, hand dyed cotton undies, French barrettes and hair combs, and of course her super flattering, super wearable line of women's clothing. There's also an in-house spa for facials and massage. Don't delay, visit today!

We love the classic and simple red typeface used on these vintage British Railway Stickers. Reminds us of our Spaghetti & Meatballs Affirmation Print and T-Shirt. And we are so very tempted to do an "EGGS" and a "DON'T CRUSH" T-shirt too!

We've been scheming on t-shirts for a long time and finally (finally!) we've gone and done it! Six designs pulled from our considerable archive, and screen printed in Vancouver on 100% cotton women's t-shirts. Bet you can't choose just one!

And now for something different, our 2019 Calendar is available in the online shop. We can't wait to stick this one up on the fridge in all it's Gio Ponti & Annie Albers inspired glory. The colours are bananas, neon and neon pastels with our pantones, we think she's a beauty and we hope you do to!

The human eye can see millions of colors but it can take awhile for language to catch up. Take the color orange. Until the 16th century, there was no word for that color in English and even then, when writers referenced it, they said something like “that thing that is the color of an orange”.

Orange, however, seems to be the only basic color word for which no other word exists in English. There is only orange, and the name comes from the fruit. Tangerine doesn’t really count. Its name also comes from a fruit, a variety of the orange, but it wasn’t until 1899 that “tangerine” appears in print as the name of a color-and it isn’t clear why we require a new word for it. This seems no less true for persimmon and for pumpkin. There is just orange. But there was no orange, at least before oranges came to Europe.

This is not to say that no one recognized the color, only that there was no specific name for it. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” the rooster Chaunticleer dreams of a threatening fox invading the barnyard, whose “color was betwixe yelow and reed.” The fox was orange, but in the 1390s Chaucer didn’t have a word for it. He had to mix it verbally. He wasn’t the first to do so. In Old English, the form of the language spoken between the 5th and 12th centuries, well before Chaucer’s Middle English, there was a word geoluhread (yellow-red). Orange could be seen, but the compound was the only word there was for it in English for almost 1,000 years.

Also, it has never occurred to me before reading this that “chromatically brown is a low-intensity orange”. !!! Anyway, this piece is an excerpt from the book On Color.

We were thrilled last fall when we were approached by the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation to create a giant banner to hang under the Granville Street Bridge and help spread awareness of the many birds who make False Creek their home.

From the City of Vancouver website:

With spring migration in full flight just ahead of World Migratory Bird Day on May 12, the Vancouver Park Board will be installing a huge bird banner today under the Granville Street bridge on the edge of False Creek.

False Creek, as well as English Bay and Burrard Inlet, are designated as an Important Bird Area by Bird Studies Canada and Nature Canada.

Banner celebrates importance of birds

The 17 metre long, 3 metre (high) banner is a celebration of the beauty and ecological importance of birds, and will serve to welcome delegates and visitors to a major international ornithological conference in August. Designed by local designers at Banquet Workshop, it will be installed today on the south side of the north abutment of the Granville Street Bridge. It will be highly visible from Granville Island and from the water.

“Birds are a vital component of biodiversity in Vancouver. From feeding on insect pests and filling our neighbourhoods with their melodic songs, birds are also a barometer of the ecological health of our city” said Vancouver Park Board Chair Stuart Mackinnon.

Migratory Bird Day education, awareness, and activities support the Park Board’s Biodiversity Strategy and Bird Strategy. The bird banner is one of many bird themed initiatives supported by the Park Board. These include a newly opened Backyard Bird Garden at VanDusen Botanical Garden and a live streaming Heron Cam to support conservation and education about the Pacific Blue Heron colony in Stanley Park. We have our first chicks in the heron nests this week!

If you live in Vancouver take a trip to Granville Island where you have a clear view across False Creek to the pier supporting the north end of the Granville Street Bridge. Look for the pink!